An empirical study of release note production and usage in practice

The release note is one of the most important software artifacts that serves as a bridge for communication among stakeholders. Release notes contain a set of crucial information, such as descriptions of enhancements, improvements, potential issues, development, evolution, testing, and maintenance of...

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Main Authors: BI, Tingting, XIA, Xin, LO, David, GRUNDY, John, ZIMMERMANN, Thomas
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5928
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/6931/viewcontent/EStudy_ReleaseNotes_2020_av.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
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spelling sg-smu-ink.sis_research-69312021-05-12T02:16:53Z An empirical study of release note production and usage in practice BI, Tingting XIA, Xin LO, David GRUNDY, John ZIMMERMANN, Thomas The release note is one of the most important software artifacts that serves as a bridge for communication among stakeholders. Release notes contain a set of crucial information, such as descriptions of enhancements, improvements, potential issues, development, evolution, testing, and maintenance of projects throughout the whole development lifestyle. A comprehensive understanding of what makes a good release note and how to write one for different stakeholders would be highly beneficial. However, in practice, the release note is often neglected by stakeholders and has not to date been systematically investigated by researchers. In this paper, we conduct a mixed methods study to investigate the use of release notes in practice. We first conducted a large-scale empirical study of 32,425 release notes from 1,000 GitHub projects to understand current contents and information found in real-world release notes. We then performed interviews with 15 practitioners and an online survey with 314 respondents to investigate how key stakeholders perceive release notes. From the analysis of these data, we summarized eight categories of information that are normally documented in release notes in GitHub projects. We found that stakeholders consider that well-formed release notes have a positive impact on software development, such as software evolution. We concluded 28 statements grouped into eight topics based on stakeholders' opinions. There exist significant discrepancies between different stakeholders on how release notes should be written and used. Our study provides new insights on release notes and facilitates stakeholders to better take advantage of them during software development. 2020-11-01T07:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5928 info:doi/10.1109/TSE.2020.3038881 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/6931/viewcontent/EStudy_ReleaseNotes_2020_av.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Software Documentation Task analysis Testing Empirical Study Feature extraction Production Release Note Software Software development management Software Engineering
institution Singapore Management University
building SMU Libraries
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider SMU Libraries
collection InK@SMU
language English
topic Software Documentation
Task analysis
Testing
Empirical Study
Feature extraction
Production
Release Note
Software
Software development management
Software Engineering
spellingShingle Software Documentation
Task analysis
Testing
Empirical Study
Feature extraction
Production
Release Note
Software
Software development management
Software Engineering
BI, Tingting
XIA, Xin
LO, David
GRUNDY, John
ZIMMERMANN, Thomas
An empirical study of release note production and usage in practice
description The release note is one of the most important software artifacts that serves as a bridge for communication among stakeholders. Release notes contain a set of crucial information, such as descriptions of enhancements, improvements, potential issues, development, evolution, testing, and maintenance of projects throughout the whole development lifestyle. A comprehensive understanding of what makes a good release note and how to write one for different stakeholders would be highly beneficial. However, in practice, the release note is often neglected by stakeholders and has not to date been systematically investigated by researchers. In this paper, we conduct a mixed methods study to investigate the use of release notes in practice. We first conducted a large-scale empirical study of 32,425 release notes from 1,000 GitHub projects to understand current contents and information found in real-world release notes. We then performed interviews with 15 practitioners and an online survey with 314 respondents to investigate how key stakeholders perceive release notes. From the analysis of these data, we summarized eight categories of information that are normally documented in release notes in GitHub projects. We found that stakeholders consider that well-formed release notes have a positive impact on software development, such as software evolution. We concluded 28 statements grouped into eight topics based on stakeholders' opinions. There exist significant discrepancies between different stakeholders on how release notes should be written and used. Our study provides new insights on release notes and facilitates stakeholders to better take advantage of them during software development.
format text
author BI, Tingting
XIA, Xin
LO, David
GRUNDY, John
ZIMMERMANN, Thomas
author_facet BI, Tingting
XIA, Xin
LO, David
GRUNDY, John
ZIMMERMANN, Thomas
author_sort BI, Tingting
title An empirical study of release note production and usage in practice
title_short An empirical study of release note production and usage in practice
title_full An empirical study of release note production and usage in practice
title_fullStr An empirical study of release note production and usage in practice
title_full_unstemmed An empirical study of release note production and usage in practice
title_sort empirical study of release note production and usage in practice
publisher Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
publishDate 2020
url https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5928
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/6931/viewcontent/EStudy_ReleaseNotes_2020_av.pdf
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